John Freeman now seems to be fighting his peers. (Read the comments.)
Month / February 2007
New Richard Powers Interview
In this month’s Believer (incidentally, the first issue to carry an advertisement, of which the editors write, “This is the first time we’re taking ads, and it will allow the magazine to continue to exist. In future issues, there will be one page occupied by an advertising message, and this message will likely always be for a book or books you might want to buy. Having this one page of advertising per issue will enable us to pay our tiny staff better. Thanks for understanding.”), there’s a new interview with Richard Powers conducted by Alex Michod.
I Hate Charlie Brooker
Unless you have been walking around with your eyes repeatedly stapled together by an Arrow T50, and your earholes sodomized by a dominatrix’s sex toy collection, with a blindfold — a big throbbing blindfold as impenetrable as onyx — tied round it, goddammit goddammit, in the dark, the cold frightening dark where imaginary leopards gnaw upon your ankles and Fleet Street hacks bang out really fucking fragmented ledes magically syncopated to their inveterate pill-popping and flask-swigging, you surely haven’t failed to notice the latest expression of mass culture rage authored by Charlie Fucking Brooker, which has inspired a Metafilter thread, taken over the Guardian‘s column inches and, blimey, the internet (no capital letters for you, you damn evil bloggers!) in a series of crudely written sentences that come across as incoherent bloviating aimed at — well, I’m not sure exactly.
The point is this: Charlie Brooker is an angry man. Or he wants us to believe that he’s an angry man. Well, I can outdistance this Charlie Come Lately in a few paragraphs.
Charlie Fucking Brooker (hereinafter referred to, as I see fit, as “CFB”) needs to step out of his flat every once in a while. He needs to get out right now so that I can beat him up. Or maybe someone else can beat him up. Or maybe Mac enthusiasts can beat him up. Because he just doesn’t understand. And because he doesn’t understand and we cannot comprehend his rambling column (three word summary, folks: he hates Macs) and he feels compelled to declare a technological jihad, there is only one solution: a bunch of scrawny geeks, at least six thousand of them, attacking Charlie Brooker at Wembley Stadium. Someone needs to charge admission. Someone needs to provide chainsaws. And somebody needs to film it.
Charlie Brooker may hate Macs, but I hate Charlie Fucking Brooker. I have always hated Charlie Fucking Brooker even before I knew who he was. Even before I was aware that he was a columnist. Even before I knew his name. When I was a boy, I asked several of my friends who I might hate in my adulthood and they suggested that it would be some English guy named Charlie. I did not know who this Charlie would be. Oh, but now I know who he is!
I hate the people who read Charlie Fucking Brooker, and I hate the people who think they read Charlie Fucking Brooker. I even hate the people who even considered reading Charlie Brooker. I will go on hating Charlie Fucking Brooker, even if we have a crazy night and he proves okay in the sack. Even if he turns out to be a good guy and he buys me a lager.
There can be no quarter! Charlie Brooker must be stopped. But more importantly, he must be hated!
This has been a cultural commentary.
This week: Ed spent an uninterrupted sixteen hour period contemplating several ways to murder Charlie Fucking Brooker (on his PC). He went to the gun range and fired about thirty-two rounds of ammo into targets that he named Charlie Fucking Brooker. He read Charlie Fucking Brooker‘s latest column and realized that the UK finally had its own version of Chuck Klosterman.
Dubya Begins “Presidential Book Club” with Vanity Press Title; Washington Insiders Remain Skeptical
Roundup
- The Millions’ Garth Risk Hallberg offers “an attempt of a review” for Against the Day.
- Orhan Pamuk is not pleased with “being secure.” Accordingly, Pamuk has spent much of his spare time combing through the DSM-IV for ways to be insecure. In addition to isolating a large chunk of his friends by revealing TMI at cafe sitdowns, Pamuk has adopted an awkward gait, hunched shoulders, and has started to pen confessional essays similar to Jonathan Franzen’s.
- Clive Cussler inflating book sales? The next thing you know, he’ll inflate his literary worth!
- Be sure to drop by the Litblog Co-Op this week for discussion on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The Wizard of the Crow, which also made my top ten books of 2006.
- Poet John Hewitt is set to become a “Statue of Liberty man.” But the more important question, still unanswered, is whether Hewitt was a breast man or an ass man.
- Norman Mailer: “I’m not as interested in fights as I once was. I used to enjoy a fight. Now I look at (a fight) as something that’s going to use up a lot of the little working time I probably have left. I don’t want to get to the point where I’m frantic about the working time.” Well, then how will the old man get out all that aggression so that he can feed his ego? Cross-stitching? Bocce?
- Ed Park on PKD’s Voices from the Street.
- Michael Chabon on McCarthy’s The Road. (via Bookdaddy)
- Embarrassing books, including Bill O’Reilly’s Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder. (via Bookshelves of Doom)
- Revolutionary Road: the movie? I don’t know about this. With Sam “I’m About As Subtle as CG Petals” Mendes at the helm, I can’t see Richard Yates’ classic novel being given the hard realism treatment it deserves. (via Matthew Tiffany)
- To those who have asked me to respond to the Gavin Newsom scandal, I truly could not care less. I’m more concerned with, say, affordable housing, the homeless, the social impact of Proposition F, MUNI’s failures, and at least four thousand other issues pertaining to San Francisco. And I’m appalled at how I have been asked nearly every day during the past week to engage or joke on the matter, when what happened is between the involved parties and is frankly none of my business. And for those who might impute that I’m a Gavin apologist, I should also note that I voted for Matt Gonzalez, not Gavin, in the last election.